How Rob Manfred shaped his legacy: Rule changes, cheating scandals, Pete Rose, more

Rob Manfred’s tenure as commissioner of Major League Baseball has played out like a decade-long stress test of the sport’s future — a stretch defined by bold modernization, bruising controversy, the challenges of an unexampled global pandemic, and a relentless push to drag baseball into a faster, sleeker, more profitable era. Since taking over from Bud Selig, Manfred has in some ways been a transformative leader, but at the same time he’s reinforced some of the worst traits of his office. To some, he’s the executive who saved the game from stagnation: the architect of pitch clocks, shift restrictions, expanded playoffs, and a league finally willing to experiment. To others, he’s the steward who presided over scandal, undermined traditions, and too often turned the commissioner’s office into an extension of the owner’s suite.

The commissioner in the post-Selig era has in broad terms two duties — make money for the league and keep that money away from the players to the greatest extent possible. This two-pronged mandate has, not surprisingly, animated everything Manfred has done, from the sensible to the cynical, the adaptive to the retrograde. His career is also a case study in what happens when a sport built on nostalgia tries to reinvent itself in real time.

Manfred has been in the seat of power since January of 2015 and, barring the unexpected, he’ll remain there until his planned retirement in January of 2029, at the conclusion of his current term. While it’s premature for any firm and final appraisal of Manfred’s reign atop the sport, we can still examine the touchstone decisions, nine from the past and two from a near future still taking shape, that have defined and still will define his legacy. Those decisions by Manfred have reshaped the way fans, players, and even owners understand the power — and limits — of the commissioner’s office.

Less than one year before an almost certain battle with the players’ union begins, let’s take a look back at those decisions and what they speak, shout, and even whisper about Manfred’s leadership. 

The pitch clock

By the end of the 2022 season, it was clear MLB was being confronted by a trend viewed negatively by most — the increasing amount of time it took to complete a game. It was a trend decades in the making. In 1934, the average nine-inning game time in MLB crept above two hours for the first time. Twenty years later, it reached 2:30 for the first time. It mostly stagnated at that general level until the back half of the 1980s. In 1987, it topped 2:45 and throughout the 1990s the average game time threatened the three-hour mark. That particular Rubicon was finally crossed in 2012, when the average nine-inning MLB game spanned exactly three hours. It would stay there — peaking at 3:11 in 2021 — until pace-of-play measures were finally enacted. 

The root causes of “game bloat” were just that, plural in nature. The average number of pitches per plate appearance inched upward. The average number of pitchers per team used in a game increased from 1.97 in 1940 to 2.52 in 1979 to 3.02 in 1990 to an all-time high of 4.43 in 2021. Meantime, the average time between each pitch increased from 21.2 seconds in 2010 — the back end of available data — to a high of 23.7 seconds in 2021. Concurrent to all of this, the average number of pitches in a half inning increased from 14.6 as recently as 1990 to a high of 16.9 in 2019. 

A thicket of problems — assuming one sees them as problems — required multiple solutions and under Manfred’s leadership the league landed upon those solutions late in the 2022 season. In September of that year, the league’s competition committee approved new rules changes, the most significant of which was the implementation of a pitch clock. Such a system had been tested in the minors and in time for the 2023 season it was “promoted” to the majors. The timer put a 30-second limit between batters and, more importantly, mandated that a pitch be delivered within 15 seconds with the bases empty and 20 seconds with one or more runners on base (prior to the 2024 season, the time limit was reduced to 18 seconds with runners on). As well, the batter was not spared, as he was required to be in the box and focused on the pitcher by the time there were eight seconds left on the pitch clock. Pitchers who violated the pitch-clock rules were charged with an automatic ball, while batters who ran foul were dinged with a strike — sufficient disincentives on both sides. The results of the pitch clock plus limits on pitcher disengagements and mound visits and a three-batter minimum for pitchers were stark: 

Some baseball fans who can be characterized as “deep enthusiasts” objected, as they characterized the changes as yielding “less baseball.” To most, though, the implementation of the pitch clock and other time-reducing measures whittled away at idle downtime during major-league games, a welcome change. That is to say, the pitch clock very much achieved the desired effect and made the MLB game as brisk of an affair as it had been in almost four decades. 

The A’s fiasco 

At this point in the arc of baseball history, everyone should have long ago been disabused of the notion that the commissioner is anything but a toady for the interests of team owners, albeit one costumed somewhat convincingly in power and authority. For the few who weren’t, though, Manfred’s comments in June of 2023 surely revealed all. In response to the “reverse boycott” undertaken by fans of the Oakland A’s, itself response to the depredations of owner John Fisher, Manfred said this, via ESPN: 

“I mean, it was great. It is great to see what is this year almost an average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night. That’s a great thing.”

Manfred later tried to walk back these comments, but first instincts can be revelatory. In Manfred’s case, his first instinct was to mock 25,000 fans on the cusp of losing their team to another city who were trying to be heard, seen, and respected. These are not the words of a steward of the game. These are the words of a valet to ownership. Manfred has long been thin-skinned and at times unable to tame his most juvenile instincts when he receives even the slightest pushback in public settings. This, though, was caustic to an extreme, especially once you consider the remarks were leveled at paying customers suffering under the weight of Fisher’s cupidity. Those paying customers, though, dared to stand athwart an owner’s wishes, and that was too much for Manfred. 

It was common to see Fisher’s proxies, including Manfred, cite declining attendance in Oakland as justification for the thoroughly cynical and ham-fisted efforts to relocate the team to Las Vegas — efforts that have yet to yield any tangible results to that end — but that strips away essential context. Specifically, fans of the team have been confronted with inadequate payrolls, multiple roster teardowns for years (with hikes in ticket prices following those teardowns), and constant relocation rumors and threats. Fisher also neglected basic stadium maintenance for so long that the Oakland Coliseum devolved into a thoroughly inhospitable environment for fans and players alike. Perhaps above all, Fisher rejected three proposed ballpark sites in Oakland, all of which came with substantial levels of public funding/corporate welfare attached. Still and yet, Manfred said this soon after his broadside directed at A’s fans: 

“There is no Oakland offer, OK? They never got to a point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site.”

The Oakland Mayor’s Office soon thereafter heatedly disputed Manfred’s characterization of local efforts to keep the A’s in Oakland. Oakland mayor Sheng Thao at her request met with Manfred and laid out proof of the city’s offer to Fisher and the A’s. The details, via The Athletic: 

The city, in the presentation it prepared for Manfred and the owners, said it secured more than $425 million in funding to cover offsite infrastructure costs, $65 million more than the A’s requested. The team would pay for onsite infrastructure and development, but the city would reimburse about $500 million of that cost through the creation of an infrastructure financing district, according to Molly Maybrun, the city’s lead negotiator and project manager for the Howard Terminal site.

Five days after the city presented Fisher with its proposal, the A’s announced they would relocate to Las Vegas without ever replying to Thao. The club made the decision despite being promised by Oakland more public funding than it requested and more than Las Vegas had pledged. And then Manfred went before the press and flatly declared no such offer had ever been made. 

Why would the A’s give up a shared spot in MLB’s sixth-largest market for one in what would be MLB’s smallest market? Revenue sharing surely played a leading role. The A’s status as a revenue-sharing recipient had been phased out in accordance with the 2017-21 collective bargaining agreement (CBA), but in relatively tiny Las Vegas their spot would be permanently ensured. Team owners love nothing more than guaranteed revenue that requires they do nothing in return for it but merely exist, and there’s little doubt that animated Fisher’s efforts — efforts that, to repeat, still haven’t ensured a future move to Vegas will even take place. 

As for Manfred, he not only publicly supported Fisher’s cruel racket, but he also shepherded it through Fisher’s fellow owners via unanimous approval. This is self-debasement on Manfred’s part and, as a consequence, he oversaw the first franchise relocation since 2004, when the Expos moved from Montreal to Washington, D.C., and just the second relocation since the early 1970s. He did this because the commissioner works for the owners — not the fans, not the players, and not even the game itself. 

The last commissioner to have any sense of autonomy was Fay Vincent, who was fired from the job for the mortal sin of prioritizing the interests of the game over the interests of owners. His successor was Bud Selig, an actual team owner, and at that point the mask had fully slipped. Manfred cut his teeth under Selig as his labor-relations point man, and as commissioner he’s done nothing but advance the ethos established by Selig — that the interests of team ownership trump all else. Maybe you were inclined to dismiss the model that Selig established since he was, again, a team owner himself. Manfred, though, has put any such quaint hopes fully out of reach with his reign of servility. 

The shrinking of the minor leagues 

MLB at some point in the second half of 2019 began discussing in earnest a radical proposal that would eventually reshape the affiliated minor leagues. That radical proposal over which Manfred presided involved contracting the number of minor-league teams associated with MLB and then exerting more institutional control over the clubs that survived the purge. Specifically, MLB’s proposal called for reducing the number of affiliated minor league franchises from 160 to 120. 

That entailed eliminating entirely the rookie-level and short-season leagues and the 42 teams thereof. At the same time the St. Paul Saints and Sugar Land Skeeters franchises became affiliated, which brought the overall casualty count to 40. Getting Minor League Baseball to agree to such shrinkage would normally have been all but impossible, but the COVID-19 pandemic had resulted in crushing losses for the minors and its constituent teams, which in turn gave them less leverage against MLB’s desires. At around the same time, MLB pressed to make permanent the compressing of the MLB Draft down to 20 rounds, which had been presumed to be a one-off structure in 2020 in response to the pandemic. “I think we all know MLB’s ultimate objective as it relates to this subject,” a scout told CBS Sports’ R.J. Anderson in the spring of 2020, “and this is certainly an unfortunate manner in which they can claim plausible deniability, given the cash-flow considerations at play, while progressing their agenda on that front.”

Late in 2020, that agenda yielded the desired result, as the two sides agreed to the sweeping changes. Those 40 cities lost their affiliated teams, and the New York-Penn and Pioneer Leagues, which began in 1939, were, respectively, shut down and demoted to indpendent status. The Appalachian League became an off-season circuit for college players. Each team’s system at that point consisted of four rungs — Low-A, High-A, Double-A, and Triple-A — and a domestic and foreign rookie-level complex league team. As the Associated Press summarized at the time: 

“MLB ended the Professional Baseball Agreement that governed the relationship between the majors and minors. The National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, which had governed the minors since 1901, is closing down, and the minors will be run from MLB’s office in New York under the supervision of Peter Woodfork, MLB’s new senior vice president of minor league operations and development.”

No fewer than three lawsuits against MLB followed and one of them, filed by the parent companies of four former minor-league teams, challenged the league’s long-standing (and inexplicable) exemption from antitrust laws. In September of 2023, the law firm representing those companies petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the exemption. 

Depending upon one’s perspective, Manfred’s and MLB’s takeover and scaling down of the affiliated minors is either a self-serving act of destruction and greed or an overdue exercise in efficiency. What’s beyond question is that it’s a major turning point in the history of the league’s relationship with the minors. 

Immunity for Astros players 

Manfred’s decision to grant immunity to the Houston Astros players in an electronic sign-stealing scandal remains one of the most debated moments of his tenure. In early 2020, MLB concluded its probe into the team’s 2017–18 sign-stealing scheme, which crudely featured the banging of trash cans to signal incoming pitch types to the hitter. While the franchise paid a price — a $5 million fine, forfeiture of top draft picks, and the dismissal of both general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch — no active players were punished. Instead, the league granted blanket immunity in exchange for player testimony. 

Manfred’s reasoning at the time centered around practicality. He believed the investigation would stall without full player cooperation and that the sheer number of implicated individuals would make individual discipline unworkable. However, in a June 2023 interview, Manfred admitted the decision may have been a mistake: 

“I’m not sure that I would have approached it with giving players immunity. Once we gave players immunity, it puts you in a box as to what exactly you were going to do in terms of punishment. I might have gone about the investigative process without that grant of immunity and see where it takes us. Starting with, I’m not going to punish anybody, maybe not my best decision ever.”

The fallout was significant, at least in baseball circles. Many fans and players viewed the lack of player discipline as a compromise of competitive integrity and one that further undermined the already tarnished Astros’ 2017 World Series title. Calls for the Astros to be stripped of the title, which they won in seven games over the Dodgers, grew so loud that Manfred was finally forced to address them, which led to one of his biggest public gaffes as commissioner. “The idea of an asterisk or asking for a piece of metal back seems like a futile act,” Manfred said in February of 2020. “People will always know something was different about the 2017 season, and whether we made that decision right or wrong, we undertook a thorough investigation, and had the intestinal fortitude to share the results of the investigation, even when those results were not very pretty.”

The point Manfred was making quite predictably got submerged in his decision to refer to the World Series trophy — the Commissioner’s Trophy, as it’s coincidentally known — as “a piece of metal” The pushback against Manfred’s dismissive remarks was immediate and widespread. None was more direct than Justin Turner, a member of that 2017 Dodgers team that lost to the Astros in the World Series. “For him to devalue it the way he did just tells me how out of touch he is with the players in this game,” Turner said soon after Manfred made his remarks. “At this point the only thing devaluing that trophy is that it says ‘commissioner’ on it.”

Manfred soon apologized for his comments. 

As for the more important matter, the decision to grant immunity to players, the argument in favor is that MLB’s investigation might have yielded far less information — or none at all — without player cooperation. As well, Manfred put some of the responsibility for the decision on the players’ union. In the aftermath, Manfred said that the league originally approached the MLBPA with a list of players they’d grant immunity to, but, he further claimed, the union pushed back and demanded full immunity in exchange for cooperation. In essence, Manfred told players angry over Astros players going unpunished to blame their union leaders.

In retrospect, the Astros case exposed the limits of the commissioner’s office when navigating matters of governance, player relations, and public credibility. Manfred’s choice to prioritize fact-finding and actionable testimony over punishment may have brought clarity, but that clarity came at a cost to perceived fairness. As a result, lessons were learned. “I do think on a go-forward basis,” Manfred said in early 2020, “it’s important for us to establish player accountability on these issues.”  

The Pete Rose reinstatement 

For a long time, a necessary bit of baseball pedantry was to point out a spot on the league’s permanently ineligible list was just that — permanent and everlasting, not something that went away with the person’s death. It was not, contrary to common parlance, a “lifetime ban.” Manfred, though, changed all that with a pen stroke. 

Pete Rose, MLB’s all-time hits leader and one of the most divisive figures of baseball’s modern era, agreed to be placed on the permanently ineligible list in 1989 and, two years later, the Hall of Fame passed a rule stating that those on the permanently ineligible list were not eligible for election into the Hall. As such, Rose has never appeared on a Hall of Fame ballot. 

Rose’s placement on the list was the result of his betting on baseball — allegations Rose finally admitted to in his 2004 autobiography, albeit after years of denials. According to MLB’s investigation, Rose on multiple occasions bet on the Cincinnati Reds to win from 1985-87 during which time he both played for and managed the team. Rose had appealed for reinstatement multiple times, including one that was denied by Manfred in 2015. Rose’s placement on the list was in keeping with the punishments laid out in the text of Rule 21(d), which has for decades been posted in every major-league clubhouse.

Rose, thanks in large measure to his 4,256 career hits; three World Series rings; and 17 All-Star selections, would have been an obvious first-ballot choice for Cooperstown, but his permanent ineligibility and the rule-breaking that led to it got in the way. That is, until May of 2025, when Manfred reinstated posthumously Rose and 16 others, including “Shoeless” Joe Jackson.

Manfred’s decision came after Rose’s death at age 83 in September of 2024; public pressure from President Donald Trump; and a petition for reinstatement filed by California attorney Jeffrey Lenkov, who represented Rose prior to his death. Manfred responded directly to Lenkov, writing in a letter: 

“Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game. Moreover, it is hard to conceive of a penalty that has more deterrent effect than one that lasts a lifetime with no reprieve. Therefore, I have concluded that permanent ineligibility ends upon the passing of the disciplined individual, and Mr. Rose will be removed from the permanently ineligible list.”

While Manfred’s unprecedented decision did not guarantee Rose’s eventual election into the Baseball Hall of Fame, it did make such a thing possible. Jane Forbes Clark, the Hall’s chairman of the board, released a statement pursuant to Manfred’s ruling:

“The National Baseball Hall of Fame has always maintained that anyone removed from Baseball’s permanently ineligible list will become eligible for Hall of Fame consideration. Major League Baseball’s decision to remove deceased individuals from the permanently ineligible list will allow for the Hall of Fame candidacy of such individuals to now be considered. The Historical Overview Committee will develop the ballot of eight names for the Classic Baseball Era Committee – which evaluates candidates who made their greatest impact on the game prior to 1980 – to vote on when it meets next in December 2027.”

In essence, the modifier “permanently” appended to “ineligible” no longer means that in both rule and practice — at least in the cases of Rose, Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Happy Felsch, Chick Gandil, Fred McMullin, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver, Lefty Williams, Joe Gedeon, Gene Paulette, Benny Kauff, Lee Magee, Phil Douglas, Cozy Dolan, Jimmy O’Connell, and William Cox. Was the decision wise? Will reducing a permanent ban to a lifetime one be wielded by future commissioners? For good or ill, Manfred’s Rose decision will reverberate for years and decades to come, perhaps especially now that MLB must contend with its much cozier relationship with gambling interests. 

The automated ball-strike system

Manfred’s and MLB’s decision to move toward an automated ball-strike system (ABS) is, in the narrow sense, a technological upgrade. But in the broader civic sense — the sense in which baseball insists it is both a pastime and a public trust — it amounts to a philosophical bet on what the sport should feel like. Baseball has long sold itself with the tension between precision and fallibility. The strike zone, exact in the rulebook yet elastic in practice, has long been the province of human judgment.  An umpire’s acumen, pulse, posture, reputation, and, yes, occasionally his stubbornness all conspire to determine whether a pitch is a strike or a ball. Starting in 2026, ABS will at certain junctures replace all that with the indifferent geometry of a digital box. 

Rather than automating the calling off all pitches the batter doesn’t offer at, a challenge system will be used. Such a system has been used at various rungs of the minors for the past few years and during big-league spring training in 2025. Here’s how it will work, complete with corporate sponsorship: 

The league’s argument for it amounts to a straightforward emphasis on accuracy. In an era when almost every pitch is clipped, posted, and litigated online, the idea that baseball should align its officiating with the expectations of an increasingly data-native audience is a sound one. More to the point, the ones most affected by missed calls — the pitchers and hitters themselves — by and large want the accuracy and consistency that ABS provides. 

On a purely technical level, ABS works. The minor-league trials have smoothed many of the early glitches. Players have adapted. The system can produce a zone that is reliable, transparent, and immune to any emotional gravity. Even as plate umpires have improved their accuracy with tech-enabled audits, it’s simply beyond human capacity to judge pitches correctly given contemporary levels of velocity and late movement. Since 2008, the extent of available data, plate umpires have called pitches defined as “on the corners” correctly just 47.6% of the time, according to TruMedia data. ABS will strike at the heart of that weakness. 

Depending upon one’s viewpoint, the challenge system is either a sensible middle ground between the fully human and the fully automated or a half-measure that acknowledges the problem of umpire accuracy but doesn’t completely solve it. Manfred in a September 2025 statement confronted the matter: 

“Throughout this process we have worked on deploying the system in a way that’s acceptable to players. The strong preference from players for the Challenge format over using the technology to call every pitch was a key factor in determining the system we are announcing today. I commend the Joint Competition Committee for striking the right balance of preserving the integral role of the umpire in the game with the ability to correct a missed call in a high-leverage situation, all while preserving the pace and rhythm of the game.”

To MLB this is progress. To those saying nay to such changes, progress often carries a cost, and the bill here is cultural. Baseball risks losing one of the last unscripted human negotiations on the field — the interplay between order and chaos, letter-of-the-law and lived reality. At a fundamental level, though, sports depend upon a structural fairness once the games begin, and ABS — even via a “mere” challenge system — advances that fairness. 

The lockout of 2021-22

Time was when every time the CBA, the accord that governs the working relationship between teams and players, came up for renewal, a labor stoppage followed. However, the lacerating players’ strike of 1994-95 put an end to that period of baseball labor history, and an era of relative peace, or at least detente, held for almost the next three decades. The owner-led lockout of 2021 brought it to an end. 

Shortly after midnight on Dec. 2, 2021, the lockout began after owners voted unanimously in favor of the drastic step. At the time, Manfred said that the motivation behind the lockout was to “jumpstart the negotiations and get us to an agreement that will allow the season to start on time.” The actions of owners, however, showed those words to be false as the league did not present its first proposal to the union until Jan. 13 — some six weeks later. It took almost another month, on Feb. 10, for Manfred to finally address the media for the first time during the lockout. Days later, MLB announced that the official start of spring training would be pushed back and, toward the end of the month, Manfred attended negotiations in person for the first time, which was a sign that a breakthrough was potentially at hand. Along the way, though, the major-league portion of the Rule 5 Draft was not held for the first time since 1920. 

That belated breakthrough came at last on March 10, when MLB and the MLBPA reached an agreement on a new CBA pending ratification by owners. That brought an end to the owner-implemented lockout after 99 days. Despite Manfred’s prior announcements that regular-season games had been cancelled, a full 162-game schedule was played, with Opening Day being pushed back a week and in-season off days being limited. 

Aside from the usual and very important financial wranglings between the two sides, the universal designated hitter rule emerged from the 2021 CBA, as did a new draft lottery. Perhaps most important, both sides agreed to October –- and November –- changes that brought MLB into a new postseason era. 

The growing playoffs

From 1903 — when the National Agreement ended a bitter dispute between the circuits and tethered the American League to the National League forevermore — until 1969 — when the divisional era began — baseball’s “postseason” consisted of just the two pennant winners and the World Series. The advent of the divisional era meant four playoff teams, and that sustained, not counting the one-time structure of the strike-shortened 1981 season, until the wild card was implemented in 1995 and thus introduced an eight-team format. That structure, at least in terms of the size of the playoff field, was in place until 2012, when the postseason field grew to 10 teams. The COVID-compromised 2020 campaign may have given MLB a taste for a larger playoff field, and indeed the 2021 CBA detailed above brought about the advent of the 12-team playoff field in 2022. That remains the format, although any reading of the tea leaves suggests the postseason bloat will continue with the next CBA. 

Playoff expansion in Major League Baseball is, on the surface, a tidy business decision: more teams, more games, more inventory to sell as broadcast revenues on other fronts face an uncertain future. (To put a finer point on it, the Dodgers in 2025 became the first team to play a postseason game in three different months.) Peer more closely, though, and you’ll find a philosophical fracture — a quiet but unmistakable shift in what the league believes competition should look like. Baseball, more than any of the major sports, has always demanded a long view. Six months, 162 games, and the grind incrementally revealing what the standings eventually confirm. It was a system that prized excellence and punished middling ambiguity. Now, with 12 teams in and pressure building for 14, the league has undermined the game’s signature attribute. This isn’t unique to Manfred, but he’ll likely become the first elected commissioner to expand the playoffs not once but twice.

MLB’s public rationale is predictable enough. Expanded playoffs “keep more markets engaged,” “sustain fan interest,” and “create opportunity.” All of that contains a certain truth. A September filled with meaningful baseball in more cities is not inherently a bad thing. But the trade-off is a creeping mediocrity that the league pretends not to notice. A system that once reserved October for the truly exceptional is no more. Sub-.500 teams sniffing the postseason isn’t drama, traditionalists would argue, it’s dilution. It’s crowning the winner of a marathon based on the results of a sprint. It’s trading coherence for spectacle. 

Maybe the more casual fans to which Manfred and the league increasingly cater won’t care. Maybe that spectacle wins. But as MLB keeps widening the door, it shrinks the meaning of walking through it. 

The new national TV contract

When MLB forged a new contract with longtime broadcast partner ESPN in 2021, Manfred committed perhaps his costliest financial blunder as commissioner. The contract gave ESPN the rights to roughly 30 games a year — including Sunday Night Baseball — the Home Run Derby, and the Wild Card round for an average price of $550 million per year through 2028, almost $4 billion in total worth. MLB, however, also pressed for an opt-out in the contract after the 2025 season. ESPN agreed and was able to secure an opt-out of their own. After the 2025 season, ESPN did indeed opt out of the final three years of the pact, and then MLB, in what seemed like a hollow fit of pique, also opted out. 

For a time it seemed like the MLB-ESPN relationship, which had been in place since 1990, would end. In November, though, ESPN was indeed a prominent part of MLB’s new suite of national-broadcast accords, and only then was it apparent what an error in business judgment Manfred had made in reportedly pressing for that opt-out. MLB wound up with the same annual commitment from ESPN, $550 million, but the inventory under ESPN’s control was quite different. Over what would’ve been the final three years of the original contract, ESPN now has in-market rights to six teams (Twins, Diamondbacks, Guardians, Rockies, Padres, and Mariners) and the option to add more if they become available. ESPN will also carry 30 exclusive weeknight games. Most critically, ESPN also gains rights to the popular MLB.TV service, which allows fans to watch out-of-market games for all 30 teams. MLB.TV is one of the league’s most valuable assets, and now it is ESPN’s. For what’s plainly a more lucrative package than what ESPN had before, it’s paying MLB the exact same price. 

As for what’s going to NBC and Netflix, they’ll pay a combined $250 million for the rights to Sunday Night Baseball, the opening rounds of the playoffs, the Field of Dreams Game, the Home Run Derby, Sunday morning games, and the standalone Opening Night game. Through the life of the new deal, that comes to almost $1 billion less than ESPN had been set to pay for basically the same rights inventory before the opt-out. Perhaps to make up that gap, the league had to pawn off MLB.TV. 

There’s also a possible loss of eyeballs to note. Sunday Night Baseball, MLB’s marquee regular season franchise and once the province of ESPN, now belongs to NBC. That sounds potentially like increased visibility until you consider that NBC will air baseball only when it doesn’t conflict with its NFL or NBA games. When it does, Sunday Night Baseball will be confined to the Peacock streaming service. 

Manfred’s failure to anticipate which party would benefit from the dueling opt-outs and then his decision to give up the rights to MLB.TV to paper over that initial mistake may do great harm to the league’s bottom line before he retires. 

The looming lockout

As is the case with every CBA negotiation, whether in the past or looming, the core tensions persist, and those core tensions will very likely result in another owner-led lockout. This one will happen sometime after the 2026 season is completed and the current CBA expires on Dec. 1 of that year. It’s not hard to work out by instinct that the ingredients for another freeze are quietly mixing in the background. Or not so quietly, as it turns out. In early 2025, Manfred said this of the possibility of a second straight lockout: 

“In a bizarre way, it’s actually a positive. There is leverage associated with an offseason lockout, and the process of collective bargaining under the NLRA (National Labor Relations Act) works based on leverage. The great thing about offseason lockouts is the leverage that exists gets applied between the bargaining parties.”

Such a hastening was not much in evidence during the last lockout, but this is simply Manfred’s way of preemptively preparing fans for the lockout and spinning it as a necessary step toward an uninterrupted 2027 season. Preludes and throat-clearing notwithstanding, the fight as always will be over money — or how the league’s revenues are split between owners and players and what even constitutes baseball revenue. MLB and Manfred are poised to push for a cap on team payrolls, but the union has never shown any whit of a sign that they’d be willing to consider such a thing — never have never will, remains the MLBPA’s stance toward discussing a salary cap. Still, Manfred has used his platform to attempt to drive a wedge between players on this front. 

In July of 2025, Manfred was conducting the usual tour of big-league clubhouses to speak to players. While addressing the Phillies, Manfred extolled the merits of a cap on team payrolls and quite speciously highlighted the ways in which a capped system would reduce the gap between the game’s superstars and those making the league minimum or thereabouts. No less a figure than Bryce Harper picked up on the message, stood firmly in Manfred’s personal space, and told the commissioner of his cap advocacy, “If you want to speak about that, you can get the f— out of our clubhouse.” Manfred responded in kind. 

The commissioner in some regards is less a powerful figure than he is a powerful-seeming figurehead. That’s to say, his job is to faithfully do the bidding of owners and to a lesser extent absorb criticism that would otherwise be directed at the lords of the sport. In this instance, it is the owners, or at least an influential subset of them, who want to press for a cap all over again even though it’s a historical imperative that they won’t get one. Orioles owner David Rubenstein, who had not long been on the “job” at the time, spoke Manfred’s marching orders in early 2025: 

“I wish it would be the case that we would have a salary cap in baseball the way other sports do, and maybe eventually we will, but we don’t have that now. I suspect we’ll probably have something closer to what the NFL and the NBA have, but there’s no guarantee of that.”

MLB is the only non-capped league among the four major North American sports and it’s no great leap to think that MLB owners see this as an emblem of their failure to bring labor to heel. Vigorously pursuing it, however, could turn an offseason lockout into a labor stoppage that costs us some or all of the 2026 season (Harper also warned Manfred that he and his fellow union members were “not scared to lose 162 games”). So is their white whale, the cap, a genuine aim for them in the upcoming CBA talks, or are owners positioning a cap demand as a “false concession” that they’ll later offer up in exchange for other wish-list items from the players? That’s unknown at this juncture, but things like harder limits on the Competitive Balance Tax (the misnomered “soft” cap already in place in MLB) and the implementation of an international draft (another means to restrict the flow of money toward players) are probably in play. As well, any changes to MLB’s revenue-sharing system are subject to collective bargaining, and Manfred may be angling for such changes. This is where the small-market/large-market schism presents a problem to the commissioner. “I have owners with really strongly held views that I need to coalesce into a position that we’ll ultimately take to the MLBPA,” Manfred said in February of 2025. 

Whether good-faith negotiations are in the offing or guns are being oiled for war, Manfred’s most fundamental challenge — one that must be met before trying to stare down the union — is to build a sturdy consensus within the ranks of owners. That work will also have bearing on another long-term vision of Manfred’s, which is the reordering of the sport’s broadcast rights. 

MLB and many of its franchises were hit hard by cord-cutting and the ensuing cable-television bubble. In a vacuum, a transition to streaming should be simple enough, but one problem is that a number of MLB teams are under contract with regional sports networks (RSNs). That’s why 2028 becomes an important checkpoint for this ongoing subplot. That’s when many of those contracts end, and thus it’s also when Manfred and the league want to gain control over as many teams’ rights as possible. That will allow MLB to build a league inventory of team rights, and by design those will be available around the same time many of the league’s national-television contracts expire. 

The heaviest lift — and the biggest unknown — will be the handling of those local-media rights. Persuading large-market teams like the Yankees, Cubs, Dodgers, and Red Sox, who all make a lot of money off their local-broadcast contracts and have ownership stakes in (or full ownership of) their respective RSNs, to cede control will be a titan’s lift, and it plays into the schism noted above. Achieving that would mean drastic changes to the league’s local revenue-sharing structure and, as mentioned, such changes must be approved by the players during CBA talks. Given Manfred’s strong desire to make all this happen — it’s a way to flatten out revenue disparities within the sport — and given the likelihood that he’ll manage an accord among owners before taking the matter to the players, that amounts to a lot of leverage for the labor side. A fight, possibly a protracted and damaging one, is headed this way. 

League expansion 

As these words are written, it’s been more than a quarter-century since MLB added an expansion franchise to the league. Historically, that’s a long gap. MLB first expanded in the 1960s, and that decade alone saw three rounds of growth and swelled the league from 16 franchises to 24 by the time the 1970s arrived. In 1977, MLB added a pair of additional teams — the Seattle Mariners and the Toronto Blue Jays — and there were no more until the early 1990s. As a money grab by the league in response to the judgments against owners for collusion against free agents in the 1980s, MLB, probably unwisely, indulged in “double” expansion in the 1990s. In 1993, the Colorado Rockies and Miami Marlins were added to the fold and 1998 saw the onboarding of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Rays. That brought us to the 30-team league structure that’s prevailed since. 

That will soon change. The expansion gap has been historically a long one and owners are no doubt craving expansion fees after those cable and RSN bubbles popped, or at least deflated a bit. Beyond that, going from 30 to 32 teams is a clean logistical fit and would make creating the regular-season schedule a less complicated process. Manfred’s final term expires in January of 2029, and it’s quite unlikely that the two new teams will be playing games by that point. In February of 2024, though, the commissioner told reporters that he “would like the process along and [cities] selected.” That’s to say, expansion is happening, and the foundation for it — the specifics of it — will be the capstone of Manfred’s tenure. 

The A’s situation chronicled above may need to be resolved before franchises can be awarded, but at some point serious bids will begin to take shape. Destinations like Nashville, Charlotte, Montreal, Austin/San Antonio, Salt Lake City, Portland, and maybe even Mexico City, among other possibilities, figure to be under varying levels of consideration. That, though, is a fluid situation depending in large measure upon how much public funding the municipalities in question are (quite unwisely) willing to commit to a stadium project. 

No matter which new markets MLB ventures into under Manfred’s leadership, the latest round of expansion seems likely to lead to realignment. Eight divisions of four teams each figure to emerge from the mix, while it’s also possible that MLB re-conceives how the two leagues are organized. The National and American Leagues are rich with history, but the current affiliations might be scrapped in favor of one driven by geography, not unlike what the NBA features. Such a drastic step may not be likely, per se, but it’s very much within the range of possibilities. Whatever the particulars, those particulars may be Manfred’s final acts as commissioner. 

Whether expansion proceeds as expansion normally does or whether it gets framed as part of the “healing process” from the great labor war of 2026-27 — perish the thought — is yet to be determined. That’s another way of saying that Manfred’s last impression upon us is yet to be determined. At once, much of his story has already been written, but much is still to come.